Growing up in the 1960s, I was surrounded by pop-culture touchstones – The Beatles, The Man from UNCLE and Civil War News gum cards. The biggest influence on my life was Marvel Comics. I wanted to write something about the early days of Marvel, but felt it needed to be put in the right cultural context. So this is my Marvel Comics ...

Thursday, 11 October 2018

Stan Lee in a Post-Fact World

IF YOU'VE NEVER READ THE JACK KIRBY INTERVIEW in The Comics Journal 134 (Feb 1990), you really should. It's the basis for most of the unfounded vitriol heaped on Marvel Editor and architect Stan Lee over the last 28 years, and many Kirby supporters view it as the literal truth. But is it the literal truth? I really don't think so ...

For over thirty years, fans have argued over who created what in the Marvel Universe ... but does it actually matter?

Yet, it takes only the most cursory search of the internet to find an abundance of comments from some of Kirby's more extreme followers who take every word of that interview as gospel ... this despite even interviewer Gary Groth admitting that "some of Jack's claims may have been exaggerated."The further effect of that interview was to polarise Jack Kirby's and Stan Lee's camps, a rift which seems to have deepened right up to the present day. And neither side wants to shift their position an inch.I really don't know why - after all this time - I should be surprised by that. There has been much talk in the Meejah about how we live in a post-fact world, as evidenced by those who cling to their beliefs - despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary - and the devaluation of the advice of experts. The blame for this has been laid squarely at the door of Steve Bannon and his "alt-facts" strategy that put Donald Trump in the White House.

Is Donald Trump the hapless victim of a manipulating Steve Bannon?

But I don't think that's true. I think the tendency of some folk to believe their emotions rather than their intellect has always been there. As far back as 1721, erudite satirist and thinker Jonathan Swift opined, "Reasoning will never make a Man correct an ill Opinion, which by Reasoning he never acquired" ... or as it's more often written, "You cannot reason people out of positions they didn’t reason themselves into."So, the theory goes, once someone has an opinion in their head, it's nigh-on impossible to get them to change their mind. And facts be damned. Which, admittedly, we are seeing more and more of these days.That probably means the rest of what I have to say here will mostly fall on deaf ears and is essentially a waste of my time. But I really do have to take issue with some of the comments Kirby made in that interview nearly thirty years ago, because some of the assertions just don't correlate with the known facts

THE JACK KIRBY INTERVIEW

When Gary Groth steers Jack Kirby towards the subject of the creation of the FF back in 1961, Kirby replies with "I came in [to the Marvel offices] and they were moving out the furniture, they were taking desks out — and I needed the work! I had a family and a house and all of a sudden Marvel is coming apart."Now that probably makes for great copy from interviewer Gary Groth's point of view, but his responsibility as a journalist would have been to challenge every bit of that assertion. For example, Jack turned up at the Marvel Offices and they (who?) were taking the furniture out. Presumably, this was a weekday ... I've worked in office environments all my adult life, and never once have the facilities team ever moved or removed furniture while the staff were in the office. Risk of accident. You wrangle office furniture at weekends when there's no staff or visitors to have a desk dropped on their foot.And Marvel was coming apart? Timely/Atlas/Marvel had indeed suffered earlier business setbacks. The first identifiable crisis was in 1954, when Wertham's shenannigans shut down several major comics companies - Fawcett and EC were the biggest - and damaged the sales of many more. Marvel Publisher Martin Goodman didn't blink. He streamlined the comics division company by firing staff - or actually making Stan do it - and cutting his page rates. The major part of his business, the magazines or "slicks", marched right on making way more money than the comics ever did. Stan commented in his memoir Excelsior!, "I remained in the office. I was like a human pilot light, left burning in the hope that we would reactivate our production at a future date. Martin needed someone who would be able to get things going again when the time came." And, of course, after a year or so the time did come.The second time Goodman's comics line suffered a setback was when he closed his own distribution company and went with American News, a company that itself closed down a few months later, leaving Goodman without distribution on all his publications. But he didn't fold his business, he simply did a deal with Independent News Distribution. IND happily distributed all of Goodman's magazines, but limited his comics to eight titles a month, so as not to compete with their own DC Comics. And still the comics line soldiered on.So even if Marvel was in financial difficulties in 1961, Goodman - a veteran survivor of the publishing business - would have cut the page rates, or survived on inventory or just gone all-reprint ... anything to milk every last cent out of the comics until it was impossible to make any more profit. Then he'd have sold Captain America, Human Torch, Sub-Mariner and the cowboys to DC or Charlton and Millie the Model to Archie and carried on with his slick mags, Male, Stag and others.

It's well documented that during the late 1950s and early 1960s, Martin Goodman's "slick" magazines made considerably more money than the comic books ... yet Goodman doggedly continued to publish comics, sticking with the genre through thick and thin.

Yet, for all that, it didn't appear that Marvel was having any financial problems during 1961. A quick trawl around the internet will bring up sales figures for US comics during the early 1960s. These are the figures printed in the Statement of Ownership panels in the comics, required by federal law, so we can be sure they're accurate.What these figures show was that during the first years of the 1960s, on either side of the time that the Fantastic Four was created, Marvel was doing about average to low sales figures. Not as good as Dell and some DC titles, but better than Charlton and other DC titles. Here's a sample:

Title

1960

1961

1962

Tales of the Unexpected (DC)

192,000

195,000

180,000

Star Spangled War Stories (DC)

169,000

205,000

195,000

Tales to Astonish (Marvel)

163,156

184,895

139,167

All Star Western (DC)

154,000

180,000

Cancelled

Tales of Suspense (Marvel)

148,929

184,635

126,140

Kid Colt Outlaw (Marvel)

144,746

No figures

No figures

Space Adventures (Charlton)

110,166

No figures

No figures

Unusual Tales (Charlton)

No figures

136,414

No figures

Strange Suspense Stories (Charlton)

No figures

No figures

127,740

So there's no evidence at all to suggest that Martin Goodman was on the point of shutting Marvel Comics down for business or for any other reasons. Certainly Stan's never mentioned it in any of his accounts of the period, and that's surprising. For it it were true, and Stan's efforts had brought Marvel Comics back from the brink, then you'd think – if he is as much of a credit-hog as Jack paints him – he'd be quick to point that out to anyone who'd listen. Yet, while he's described the troubles Atlas went through in 1954 and 1957, he's never mentioned the post-Atlas, pre-Marvel incarnation of the company having money problems.At the end of Jack's claim about Marvel imminently going out of business he adds a very strange remark. He says, "Stan Lee is sitting on a chair crying. He didn’t know what to do."It's pretty unlikely that Stan would have been that upset even if Martin Goodman was going to close down the "MC" (pre-Marvel) line. He had enough side projects on the go that he wouldn't have been unemployed. He'd published more than a few magazines and books on his own during the 1950s and had two syndicated newspaper strips - Willie Lumpkin with Dan DeCarlo (Dec 1959 to May 1961) and Mrs Lyon's' Cubs with Joe Maneely (Feb 1958 - Dec 1958).

After the tragic death of artist Joe Maneely in July 1958, Stan tried to carry on with Mrs Lyon's Cubs with Al Hartley, but the strip foundered and was discontinued towards the end of 1958.

To give Jack the benefit of the doubt, it's plausible that he could be speaking about 1957, when Goodman's unfortunate business decision resulted in his comics line being curtailed to eight titles a month. Conflate that with the death of Joe Maneely a few months later - a loss which is generally acknowledged to have hit Stan personally and very hard - and there may be some grains of truth in Jack's statement, but there's not necessarily any cause-and effect.Of the monster comic stories Goodman was publishing in the MC era, Jack says, "I always enjoyed doing monster books. Monster books gave me the opportunity to draw things out of the ordinary." Yet in an earlier interview for the New York 1975 Comic Art Convention Handbook, Jack said, "I was given monsters, so I did them. I would much rather have been drawing Rawhide Kid. But I did the monsters… we had Grottu and Kurrgo and It… it was a challenge to try to do something – anything – with such ridiculous characters."Aside from obvious the contradiction around whether Jack liked drawing monsters or not, I mostly include these two quotes to highlight Kirby's own admission that he was "given" monsters to do. Which supports Stan's claim that Goodman wanted monsters to capitalise on the success of Godzilla. On that basis, it's not implausible that when Goodman saw that the monsters had run their course, he instructed Stan to develop some superheroes, like DC's successful Justice League of America book.

The earliest monster cover at MC was Strange Worlds 3 (Apr 1959). It would be a few months before the other pre-Marvel fantasy comics started ploughing that same Kaiju furrow, beginning with Strange Tales 70 (Aug 1959) four months later, then Journey into Mystery, Suspense and Astonish. My analysis would be that Martin Goodman noticed better sales on the first monster cover and instructed Stan to put monsters on all the fantasy books' covers.

When asked how Stan and he collaborated on the monster stories, Jack snaps "Stan Lee and I never collaborated on anything! I’ve never seen Stan Lee write anything. I used to write the stories just like I always did." Jack doesn't even allow that Stan wrote the dialogue. "I dialogued them. If Stan Lee ever got a thing dialogued, he would get it from someone working in the office."Again this isn't corroborated by others who were working at MC at the time. Joe Sinnott described working with Stan Lee during this period. "I'd bring the story back on Friday and he'd give me another script. I never knew what kind of script I'd be getting. Stan had a big pile on his desk, and he used to write most of the stories himself in those days. You'd walk in, and he'd be banging away at his typewriter. He would finish a script and put it on the pile. Sometimes on his pile would be a western, then below it would be a science fiction, and a war story, and a romance."If Stan did indeed get someone else to dialogue any of Kirby's stories, this would have been mostly likely during the 1964 (so, later) period when he tried to get first Larry Lieber, then Robert Bernstein and Ernie Hart, to write the scripts. And we know how that turned out.Again, I want to give Jack the benefit of the doubt here and suggest that Kirby may well have written dialogue onto his artwork, but as he (by his own admission) never read the final published comics, he very likely didn't realise just how much of a contribution Stan was making to the stories.

Here's a random page of Stan Lee's dialogue from Fantastic Four 64 page 2 ... compare with a page of Jack Kirby's unedited dialogue from Forever People 1 page 6.

I would also question Jack Kirby's understanding of what writing actually is. I covered it in more depth in an earlier blog post, but essentially Jack seems to think that plotting the stories is the same as writing them. He says as much in numerous interviews through the decades from the 1970s to the 1990s. A typical example of that was an answer Kirby gave to Will Eisner in a 1982 interview about how the Lee-Kirby stories were created. "Stan Lee wouldn’t let me fill in the balloons," said Jack. "Stan Lee wouldn’t let me put in the dialogue. But I wrote the entire story under the panels."Except that the plot is definitely not the entire story. What makes a story work or not work is the way the characterisation is presented. And that is done through the dialogue. If Stan wasn't letting Jack add the dialogue, it was because Stan had very firm ideas about how the characters' personalities should be depicted. And in my view, that makes Stan's contribution a vital part of the writing process. And none of that is at odds with what Stan has always said in interviews. Kirby plotted and drew, and Stan dialogued. And that's what made the Marvel stories special.If you want to understand the difference between Stan Lee dialogue and Jack Kirby dialogue, then simply place a copy of Fantastic Four alongside a copy of Forever People and see for yourself. And, of course, there's many examples of pages Jack drew during the Silver Age that Stan rejected or had done over because he didn't agree with the direction Jack had taken in a story. So I don't think there's any denying that Stan steered the course of the Marvel books.A little bit further on in the interview, Jack describes how he created the Hulk. "The Hulk I created when I saw a woman lift a car. Her baby was caught under the running board of this car. The little child was playing in the gutter and he was crawling from the gutter onto the sidewalk under the running board of this car — he was playing in the gutter. His mother was horrified. She looked from the rear window of the car, and this woman in desperation lifted the rear end of the car. It suddenly came to me that in desperation we can all do that — we can knock down walls, we can go berserk, which we do. You know what happens when we’re in a rage — you can tear a house down. I created a character who did all that and called him the Hulk. I inserted him in a lot of the stories I was doing. Whatever the Hulk was at the beginning I got from that incident."I've already looked at this claim in an earlier post and I don't think there's anything to be gained from rehashing that here. But my main issues with this statement are:

The "mother lifts car" story is a popular urban myth. I heard it from my mum back in the early 1960s.

The science is shaky. Most scientists agree that adrenaline doesn't deliver a boost large enough or quickly enough to allow feats of superhuman strength.

Jack didn't bring the rage element to The Hulk, Steve Ditko did in the Tales to Astonish run, though there's a mention of rage triggering the Hulk's strength in Astonish 59, a story scripted by Stan Lee and pencilled by Dick Ayers.

Kirby's next claim is more contentious. Talking to Groth about Spider-Man, Jack says, "I created Spider-Man. We decided to give it to Steve Ditko. I drew the first Spider-Man cover. I created the character. I created the costume. I created all those books, but I couldn’t do them all. We decided to give the book to Steve Ditko who was the right man for the job. He did a wonderful job on that."I've also covered the creation of Spider-Man in an earlier entry in this blog, and concluded that Jack had little to do with the version of Spider-Man that eventually was published. There is a story about Joe Simon and CC Beck coming up with an unsuccessful character pitch title "The Silver Spider" that later morphed into The Fly (aka, Flyman) for Archie Comics, and Kirby mentions that he pitched Joe Simon's Silver Spider to Stan, in a 1982 interview with Will Eisner:"It was the last thing Joe and I had discussed. We had a strip called, or a script called, The Silver Spider. The Silver Spider was going into a magazine called Black Magic. Black Magic folded with Crestwood and we were left with the script. I believe I said this could become a thing called Spider-Man, see, a superhero character. I had a lot of faith in the superhero character, that they could be brought back, very, very vigorously. They weren’t being done at the time. I felt they could regenerate and I said Spider-Man would be a fine character to start with. But Joe had already moved on. So the idea was already there when I talked to Stan."

If Jack did pitch a version of Joe Simon's concept - which eventually became The Fly - to Stan then wasn't he just representing the work of others as his own? And some have pointed to the published Amazing Fantasy 15 cover as "proof" Kirby designed Spider-Man's costume ... but Barry Pearl reminded me that, in fact, Steve Ditko drew the first (though rejected) version of AF15's cover.

Steve Ditko refutes Jack's claim telling Alter Ego magazine in 2000, "One of the first things I did was to work up a costume. A vital, visual part of the character. I had to know how he looked ... before I did any breakdowns. For example: A clinging power so he wouldn't have hard shoes or boots, a hidden wrist-shooter versus a web gun and holster, etc. ... I wasn't sure Stan would like the idea of covering the character's face but I did it because it hid an obviously boyish face. It would also add mystery to the character."Now that doesn't make Stan's claim to have had the idea for Spider-Man himself true, but Ditko's assertion doesn't contradict Stan's, nor does it support Jack's claims. And certainly, the known facts about Joe Simon, C.C. Beck and Jack Oleck creating The Silver Spider for Harvey Comics pretty much discredit Kirby's claims to have actually created any part of Spider-Man.But as I said at the beginning of this piece, we seem to live in a world where facts count for nothing and only opinions matter, at least to those who hold them.Mark Twain once said, "It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled", or words to that effect. And that seems more true today than ever. But I do think it's a shame that many who believe Kirby's statements in The Comics Journal interview to be the literal truth seem also compelled to try to destroy Stan Lee. I'm not sure why. I'm pretty certain Stan never did anything to them.I get that Jack was angry at the way he felt he'd been treated by Marvel during the 1960s and 1970s, but his anger towards Stan Lee was simply misdirected.It wasn't Stan Lee's actions that caused Joe Simon and Jack Kirby to quit Timely Comics back in 1942. It was a dispute with publisher Martin Goodman after Goodman's accountant Maurice Coyne told Joe Simon that Goodman's was loading all the company expenses against Captain America Comics. Furious at being cheated out of their royalties, Simon and Kirby made plans to exit Timely to go over the National (DC). They started working on material for National publisher Harry Donenfeld while finishing Captain America 10. Joe's then editorial assistant Stan Lee figured out that the pair were working on material for National. Shortly after, Simon and Kirby were confronted by Martin, and his brothers Abe and David, and were fired for disloyalty. Kirby always suspected Lee of informing on him, though Joe Simon never did.

After a dispute over promised royalties on Captain America Comics, Simon and Kirby quit Martin Goodman's Timely Comics and went over to Harry Donenfeld's National Publications (DC). Their last Timely work appeared in Jan 1942, their first DC work was cover-dated Apr 1942. Kirby wouldn't return to Marvel for 15 years.

And it wasn't Stan Lee who wrote that profile for the New York Herald Tribune that made Stan out to be the driving force behind Marvel and Jack to be like the "assistant foreman in a girdle factory". It was reporter Ned Freedland. No newspaper ever gives the subject of an interview the opportunity to edit the text before publication, yet Jack believed that Stan had manufactured the whole thing to make Jack look bad. And that's pretty unreasonable. John Romita later said in an interview in the Comic Book Artist fanzine that there was "no reason to run Jack down. Stan had the position; he didn’t have to fight Jack for it. I don’t think Jack ever wanted the editorial position; if he wanted credit, he deserved credit. Stan used to give him credit all the time."It wasn't Stan that denied Jack his rightful credits. Far from it. Stan pioneered credits in comics and always was effusive in his praise of how much Jack (and others) contributed to the stories, while other companies expected their writers and artists to labour in anonymity.I'm saddened that Jack Kirby reached the end of his life feeling such bitterness towards Stan Lee, when it seems to me he was angry at the wrong person. There's a long list of people who could bear more of the blame for robbing Kirby of his due than Stan.I love Stan's work and I believe that without Stan, Marvel would never had enjoyed its massive success during the 1960s and overtaken DC in sales. It wasn't just the characters and the stories, it was the whole package - the tone of the editorial, the "club" feel to Marvel that Stan created (all by himself!), the melodramatic hype. I've written about that extensively elsewhere in this blog.Most tellingly - and this can't be stated often enough - the dialogue in the Fantastic Fours of the period is identical in style to the scripting in both the Steve Ditko and the John Romita Spider-Mans. For me that's more than enough evidence that Stan scripted the books and was responsible for crafting the personalities of the characters, a far more important aspect than either the designs of the characters' costumes or the plots of the stories.But I also loved the works of both Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko. Both contributed enormously to the success of Marvel Comics during the company's Silver Age. But they didn't do it alone.

It's also important to remember that Jack Kirby wasn't the only artist working at Marvel during those formative years. Don Heck was the first artist on Iron Man and a hugely important contributor to the other early Marvels, along with Dick Ayers, Gene Colan and John Romita.

For me it really doesn't matter who did what in the creation of these marvellous comics characters that were so much part of my childhood. I didn't care then and I don't much care now.The fact is that Stan and Jack created the Fantastic Four. Stan and Steve created Spider-Man. Stan, Larry and Jack created Thor ... well, you get the idea. It's impossible to understand, and irrelevant to focus on, the minutia of what aspects of which character were created by which writer or artist 57 years later.What I loved about Marvel Comics as I was growing up in the 1960s was the way the characters talked, as well as the friendly tone of the letters columns and the Bullpen pages. I liked the artwork too, but it was that tone, the voice of Stan Lee, that separated Marvels from all the other comics.Contemporary fans might think that the editorial swagger Stan brought to the books sounds corny and overblown now, but it wasn't in 1965. It was magical.And that was all the work of Stan Lee.Post Script - 12 Nov 2018. I didn't actually know Stan Lee, but it felt like I did. His characters were an integral part of my childhood, and the mildly liberal messages embedded in his stories influenced my own worldview as I grew into my teens. Later, I worked at Marvel UK during the 1980s and Stan visited the offices several times. He always remembered my name and which mags I edited, and that made me wonder if his memory was as bad as he always claimed. Later still, it was Stan again that inspired me to move from editing to writing, so it's no exaggeration to say that without Stan, my life would have taken a very different path. Godspeed, Stan ... thanks for all the Strange Tales and Amazing Adventures.Next: Something less controversial

25 comments:

Regarding the mother lifting the car bit, I could be wrong here, but I seem to remember a similar scene in The Hulk TV pilot episode. If so, maybe Jack unconsciously got the idea from there. Can anyone confirm if such a scene is in the episode?

Thank you, Gordie ... I spent a great deal of time on this post, carefully sifting through every interview I could get my hands on, then pondering long and hard to be sure I was being as fair as possible to all sides, based only on the evidence. I hope the next post is easier to write than this one ...

It seems that the anti-Stan brigade on another site realise that they can't address the reasoned argument you've presented here, Al, and are instead content to post links to the same tired, Lee-bashing articles (like the Groth interview) that has 'informed' their opinion for years. That suggests to me that your logic here is pretty much irrefutable.

While there is no question that Marvel was not thriving when Jack Kirby entered Marvel offices in the mid-1950s, there is no substantiation at all that furniture was being moved out.

Let me be silly just to make a point: Jack Kirby never drew anything and the Fantastic Four was ghosted! That’s silly right? But who here saw Jack Kirby draw the Fantastic Four? Or anything? He drew at home, in private. So when Kirby says “"… I’ve never seen Stan Lee write anything. I used to write the stories just like I always did."

Of course Stan did dialogue them and, as mentioned so many times, he took a couple of days off each week and stayed home and wrote. Of course Kirby never saw him write.

But if Lee did nothing, why would Gil Kane, speaking of Kirby say, “Gil Kane said in 1996: “When (Kirby) brought those things in, Stan would look over them and very often be critical of the material. He would ask him to change some of it. Jack would be totally accommodating and accept the notations for a change and he’d change it. But when we would go out to lunch, you’d have to almost tie him to the seat—he would just be raging!”

Kirby continued, “If Stan Lee ever got a thing dialogued, he would get it from someone working in the office." There was no writer in the office. Marvel published credits, would another writer stand for not getting credits? And would Martin Goodman put up with that?

Kirby said, “I used to write the stories just like I always did.” Well, we now have a half a dozen Artists editions as well as many originals floating around. We can see the following:

1. Kirby did write a lot about the plot in the margins, but virtually NONE of his dialogue was ever used.2. I read every Marvel Age comic when it originally came out. When Kirby left a series, The Avengers, X-Men, Sgt. Fury and late even the Fantastic Four the unique Satan lee dialogue stayed the same. Alteration on names, bad jokes and so on.3. This writing style was also there on comics Kirby didn’t draw, such as Daredevil and Spider-Man4. Kirby was successful in writing when he emulated Joe Simon’s 1940’s style, but Kirby did not please everyone when he emulated Stan’s in his 1970’s DC work.5. On WBAI radio from August 28, 1987. Kirby was in the studio a n d S t a n Lee called in. Here Kirby not only admits that he wasn’t “allowed” to write his own dialogue, but never read Stan’s writing.

Jack Kirby: I can tell you that I wrote a few lines myself above every panel

Stan Lee: They weren’t printed in the books. Jack isn’t wrong by his own rightsbecause—Jack, answer me truthfully— Did you ever read one of the storiesafter it was finished? I don’t think you did. I don’t think you ever read one ofmy stories. I think you were always busy drawing the next one. You neverread the book when it was finished.

Jack Kirby: I wasn’t allowed to write… dialog, Stanley… my own dialog. Andthat, I think that’s the way people are. It was insign (sic). So whatever waswritten in them was, well, it, you know, it was the action I was interested in.

Stan Lee: But I don’t think you ever felt that the dialogue was that important. And I think you felt, well, it doesn’t matter, anybody can put the dialogue in, it’s what I’m drawing that matters. And maybe you’re right. I don’t agree with it, but maybe you’re right.

You discussed the Silver Spider and Spider-Man very well. One Important fact…Kirby DID NOT draw the first cover to Spider-Man, Steve Ditko did. For whatever reason Stan rejected it and had Kirby draw the SECOND cover.

A final point: Stan may have come up with the initial concept of a Spider-Man, but the established character is a co-creation of Stan Lee and Steve Ditko. So it’s true that Jack Kirby may have had the initial concept for characters such as the Silver Surfer, but these characters were fleshed out by the team of Lee and Kirby, they are co-creators.

This post was inspired, in part, by both your recent blog entry on the subject and Kid's, so I'm gratified that you both took the time to comment favourably. And thank you for the snippet of the Stan-and-Jack radio interview. I'd heard others (probably Mark Evanier) say that Jack rarely, if ever, read the final printed stories, but I struggled to find a quote to back that up. And I had momentarily forgotten that Steve Ditko had drawn the first Amazing Fantasy 15 cover. It's such an important point that I will amend the Silver Spider/Spider-man montage in the above article to reflect that. Thanks again, Barry, for your invaluable input.

I took Jack's statement that he had drawn the first Spider-Man cover as simply meaning either the published cover to the first issue he appeared in (AF #15), or the cover to the first issue of his own mag (ASM #1), not necessarily that he had drawn Spidey on a cover before Steve. It seems obvious that Jack's own cover is based on Steve's, but, of course, he may have forgotten that pertinent fact (as he did with so many other things).

H'mm, that's a bit ambiguous, so let me elaborate. I assumed that Jack believed he designed the costume before Steve drew the strip and before he (Jack) drew the cover, as the covers were usually drawn after the contents were completed.

It's shameful that Stan Lee gets dragged through the mud for the past 30 years. Ever since Joan died, he's been f****d over even worse like his manipulative agent forcing him to make videos where he sounds like he's being forced at gun point. He's 95 years old. Let him enjoy the final years of his life in peace, he deserves it.

It *is* a shame. I doubt Stan has ever looked at any of the websites that are on a mission to trash his reputation, but I just feel I should try to redress the balance, if only for all the enjoyment Stan's scripting has given me over the decades.

Imjust wanted tomthank hou for the nice comments you made. You know, whenever someone asks me whose side Imam on, i always tell them the truth. I am in the side of LeeKirby AND Ditko. Working together, for a decade they produced some of the best comics ever.

So I enjoy blogs that try to look for the truth and not try to take sides. Also we need to enjoy these wonderful stories and not so much analyze what people did 55 years ago with today’s standards.

Thanks for a well-researched, well-reasoned examination of the conflicting claims about Marvel's genesis.

I've never understood what the anti-Lee people have thought Lee should've done about Kirby's situation. All of the available info about Martin Goodman indicates that he would have sooner cut off an arm than return rights to a comics-creator (hyperbole, maybe, though not by much). If Lee had, as a few people have suggested, given Goodman some ultimatum about walking if Kirby didn't get rights to characters, Goodman would've kicked Lee out in the proverbial New York minute.

Though Kirby may've had some legitimate beefs against Lee-- such as Lee enlisting Kirby for art-director chores, with no extra pay-- Kirby must've known on some level that he signed away "his" characters for a page-rate. Moreover, I think he was selectively angry about characters that accrued a fan-following. I'll bet nowhere in his many interviews does Kirby get mad about having given away minor characters like Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch-- but he became incensed about Marvel's ownership of Silver Surfer, because the Surfer was a fan-favorite of sorts, and so represented a more profitable commodity.

I kind of doubt that Kirby's "art director" jobs were done for free. He'd at least have received a Layouts payment for the work he did for other artists. I mentioned in another post that Joe Maneely would often do the same thing for fellow Atlas artists. Having recently re-read Sean Howe's "Marvel: The Untold Story", I now think Jack had been wound up by Steve Gerber, himself disgruntled with Marvel over the whole Howard the Duck thing, then was further incensed by Marvel's refusing to return his original artwork from the 1960s (much of which had been purloined and sold at conventions anyway.) I do understand why Jack was angry, but like you, I think he was angry with the wrong person.

In all fairness, Tony, which of us can remember the day-to-day minutia of what we were doing over 50 years ago? When people ask me questions about my years at Marvel UK or even 2000AD, half the time I can't remember ...

I'm glad you enjoyed it ... I did work very hard to represent fairly all sides of the story. I'm not especially on anyone's "side", but I do get a bit impatient with the unwarranted vitriol directed at Stan ...

I did know Stan Lee, and you're absolutely right. He always bent over backwards to give the artists credit when I interviewed him for publication, and never had a bad word to say about them, even when Kirby was busy maligning him. Your analysis is excellent.

Thank you, Dan ... I met Stan several times during my tenure at Marvel UK during the 1980s ... but I can't say I had any lengthy conversations with him. He may have had faults - which of us doesn't? - but I don't think denying his colleagues due credit was one of them ...

About Me

Air Pirate Press is a virtual publishing company started by Alan McKenzie and Brett Ewins to publish THE ART OF BRETT EWINS, a retrospective of Brett's 20+ years in the British and American comic industries.
This was followed up with McKenzie's revised third edition of THE HARRISON FORD STORY, an unauthorised biography of the top Hollywood star.
Air Pirate Press currently has several more projects in preparation.